SEE INSIDEVoices Fall-Winter 2007: Click on the cover for the Table of Contents. Read the Downstate column, “City under Siege—and How Place Dollars Could Save It” by Steve ZeitlinJOIN the New York Folklore Society today to receive Voices.

The skeletal remains of CBGB’s famous
red awning—just the spokes—still protrude
from the birthplace of punk rock on 2nd
Avenue. No flowers or memorials are left
on the street, as when punk rockers memorialized
Joey Ramone outside the club in
2001. There’s no time to mourn for CBGB,
because other victims of gentrification and
escalating real estate values plead for our
attention: Tonic, another venerable Lower
East Side rock club, Claremont Stables near
Central Park, the only stable in Manhattan
open to the public, Copacabana, the great
Latin dance hall in midtown, and Astroland,
the amusement park that anchored Coney
Island, have all closed their doors in just the
last few months.

Khadijah Shaheed, who was raised in the
Marci Housing Projects, was twelve years old
when she took her first trip to the Empire
Roller Skating Center, a mecca for skaters
in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. That’s where
she first learned to skate gracefully. “If the
Empire shuts down, a lot of skaters will
just stop skating,” she once told us. Hang
up your skates, Khadijah. The Empire, too,
has fallen.

Before the Empire became one of New
York City’s best loved roller rinks, it was a
parking garage for Ebbets Field. The Swanson
family opened the rink in 1941, and it
was family-owned through the late 1990s,
when the nationwide chain United Skates of
America took it over. What made the Empire
special? Its giant size, for one: 220 feet long
by 60 feet wide, big enough for more than
one thousand skaters at a time. The floor was
high-quality maple; the sound system was always
the best. The skaters made it legendary,
too. One was Bill Butler, who in the 1960s
and ’70s helped turn roller skating into roller
dance. “You can always tell an Empire skater
by the way they bounce,” said one longtime
deejay. The Empire was the last functioning,
purpose-built roller rink in the five boroughs.
Its next life? Probably a storage facility.

That means that storing things that people
can’t even use is more valuable in terms of
dollars per square foot than a place that
stores memories and sustains a community.
I imagine asking the anonymous storage
mogul who purchased the site, “How do you
compare the value of a storage facility and
a roller rink?”

“Simple,” he answers. “I can make more
money on storage than the previous owner
could make on skating. That means that a
storage facility is more valuable than a roller
rink.”

“Is it?” I say. “Well, let’s monetize the situation
in ways you might understand. People
like Khadijah Shaheed, who grew up skating
on those maple floors, value the club. People
invest their time and their emotions in the
place, and the site accumulates what we might
call place dollars. These are backed not by gold
bullion, as dollars once were, but by human
values and associations—a currency that
should have provided the Empire with the
resources to negotiate for its survival.

“But,” he says, “these so-called place dollars
represent the value of the Empire as it
once was. What are people willing to pay this
year and next year to skate—and how many
of them? I can make more money renting
raw space any day.”

But those place dollars pay a dividend
that can’t be ignored. The accumulated
place dollars derived from personal time and
experience can be drawn upon because new
experiences have layers of memory attached
to them. Roller skaters like Khadijah get a
tremendous amount out of the experience,
more than they can pay for it—and far more
than the practical market value of the storage
facility.

In our current world, human emotions,
values, and associations are considered the
“soft stuff.” Community activists standing
up for places that matter figuratively wheel
wheelbarrows filled with place dollars into
hearings, but these units of value are deemed worthless. Even though these place dollars
are not likely to be printed and adopted as
an alternate currency, they illustrate how the
loss of cultural value is tangible and that we
need to find a method of measuring public
attachments in our collective decision making
about the value of a place. We need forms
of cultural capital that are as quantifiable and
real as money, which—after all—has only an
agreed-upon value.

“Those place dollars are as worthless as
the paper they’re not printed on,” the storage
mogul says.

So much for Folkonomics 101.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if we are able
to calculate the place-dollar value of a given
place so precisely. These are cultural assets.
Cherished establishments and local landmarks
need support, just like parks, historic
battlefields, or history museums, which receive
government subsidies. We need to find
ways, such as rent control for local landmarks.
We need to expand preservation guidelines to
include, for instance, the “use” of a property,
not just protection for the facade. We need
to consider the time span of the tradition in
living memory, not just the age of a building,
as landmarking regulations stipulate. We can’t
afford to trade the enormous cultural value of
a grand roller rink for mini-storage.

Khadijah Shaheed recalls the night at the
Empire when her friend Moochie told her
she “skated ugly.” Moochie took her aside and
showed her how to cross the leg over as she
moved. I still can’t dance,” Khadijah told us,
“but when I cross the leg, it looks a lot more
graceful.” New York City may have more
places to store its stuff and house its richest
residents, but it has lost some of its grace.

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